Defense

In Kyiv on May 6, 2026, Oleksandr Komarov, chief executive of Kyivstar, signed an agreement making his company an authorized Starlink reseller for Ukrainian enterprises, schools, hospitals, and community clinics. He called it a “convenient and transparent channel.” VEON, Kyivstar’s Dubai-headquartered parent, did not announce exclusivity; consumer, government, and military procurement channels remain undisclosed. Behind him sit roughly 24 million mobile subscribers and a $1.16 billion 2025 revenue line, per Kyivstar’s FY2025 earnings. The agreement covers a real market segment. What it codifies for that segment matters even if it is not the only door. ...

We’re Bolting Dummy Weights Into Our Most Advanced Fighters A maintenance crew at Hill Air Force Base in Utah has spent months prepping F-35A airframes for a radar that hasn’t arrived. The jets sit in their bays, flight-ready in every respect except the one that matters: they cannot find a target. In place of the APG-85 radar — the sensor suite that makes a fifth-generation fighter a fifth-generation fighter — each aircraft carries a ballast weight, a block of metal shaped to match the radar’s mass so the jet flies correctly. The crew can maintain everything on the aircraft except the thing that makes it a weapon. ...

The Pentagon Has 60 Days of Rare Earths Left Mike Crabtree keeps a number on a whiteboard in his Saskatoon office: 60 days. That’s the U.S. defense establishment’s rare earth inventory for manufacturing F-35s, Tomahawk guidance systems, and permanent magnets in military drone motors. Crabtree, CEO of the Saskatchewan Research Council, is building the largest heavy rare earth metallization plant outside China. The deadline driving him is a U.S. ban on Chinese-sourced rare earths for defense applications, effective 2027. ...